With over 25% of permanent residents being of foreign nationality, Switzerland can be considered one of the expat hotspots of the world. And this is for many good reasons: Switzerland ranks among the top countries in terms of per capita income worldwide, is home to some of the world’s most influential companies, offers spotless healthcare, personal safety and public transportation as well as stunning landscapes, great food and cultural opportunities in abundance. And yet, all that glitters is not gold – at least for expats.
According to InterNations 2021 Expat Survey, for the category ‘ease of settling in’, Switzerland only ranks 52nd out of the 59 considered countries, with ‘finding friends’ and ‘feeling at home’ being among the weakest factors alongside other notable mentions in the field of personal happiness and integration into society.
For Ariv we took those insights, combined them with the contemporary thirst for authentic experiences in foreign countries and formed a brand and product that represents typical Swiss values and standards but embraces its members right away and eases their journey into not only living in but also enjoying Switzerland.
THE ROAD TO THE ‘ARIV’ BRAND
To achieve the best possible – and for us as company builders, as importantly, reproducible – results, we followed the principles of design thinking for our brand and product building process. For those who are not familiar with this method: according to dt-toolbook.com, it is a “mindset for creative problem solving developed at Stanford University with the aim of bringing together as many as possible different experiences and perspectives in respect to a possible problem situation”.
The foundation of design thinking is a deep understanding of the target audience and customer needs, followed by a structured process of generating ideas, prototyping and testing. During an extensive research and brand building phase, we brought together a broad variety of roles in our organisation, such as sales, marketing, business development but also administration, construction management and IT to approach the project from different angles and perspectives.
As meeting in large teams has been difficult during times of COVID-19 restrictions, we quickly established a fully digital co-creation process ranging from project management to virtual meeting, collaboration and file sharing.
As a first step, we identified possible target audience segments that might seek temporary accommodation in Switzerland and took a deep dive into their specific situations, requirements, motivations, preferences and no-gos. Through interviews, desktop research of relevant studies and content, social media monitoring and analytics, we were able to verify our findings and populate detailed persona descriptions as a base for our customer centric brand and product development.
Having decided to go with a marketing-led process, we started to define the brand first and form the product itself afterwards. In order to have a solid foundation of our brand that we could later reference every decision back to, we formulated our brand vision, core values and key consumer benefits before deciding a brand name and starting
the visual interpretation.
OUR VISION: MEMORABLE AND AUTHENTIC EXPERIENCES IN MAJOR SWISS CITIES
As the biggest influenceable concerns for our target audience revolve around the areas of social integration and appeal of their accommodation, combined with the contemporary desire to immerse in local culture when visiting new places without having to compromise on accustomed comfort, we established a brand value framework around the pillars “Swissness”, “urbanity” and “branded living”. These are defined by the following aspects:
- Swissness: Designed to be useful, providing innovative solutions, being conscious about traditions and the environment;
- Urbanity: Good access to infrastructure and city centres, supporting urban lifestyle and providing a good work-life balance;
- Branded Living: Fostering an environment of comfort, social integration and personalised service to create a worry-free, distinct living experience that is exclusively linked to our brand.
As we wanted our brand name to embody our vision and values, we decided for a term derived from the Swiss native language Romansh that can also be understood and pronounced by our international clientele and found our perfect match in ‘Ariv’ (derived from Romansh Grischun ‘arivar’ – to arrive).The brand logo is an uppercase ‘A’ composed of two triangles: a house overlooked by a mountain in the background, meant to evoke a clear and simple abstraction of a temporary home in Switzerland.Our design system is based on a grid system that can be changed and played with. The layout generates building blocks that, arranged together, take on meaning as letters or icons, echoing one of Switzerland’s best-known design traditions, where ‘form follows function’.
BRINGING THE BRAND TO LIFE
Our first location in Basel is situated in the up-and- coming northern part of the city right next to the regions’ largest mall that holds a broad variety of shops, bars and restaurants as well as entertainment and sports facilities. It is in walking distance to some of the city’s largest employers and perfectly connected to the city centre, public transport (train station and airport), nearby recreational areas along the beautiful Rhine river and an emerging culture and bar scene around the old port.
According to the identified needs during the initial design thinking process and our brand values, we will offer an inclusive and actively managed community with regular social events revolving around the topics of casual social interaction and immersion into local culture.
For an ideal staging of our community events and the promotion of a worry-free lifestyle, we committed roughly 1500m2 of indoor space plus an outdoor terrace for the purpose of our members being able to meet, create, exercise, indulge and relax.
The community space and each of the 153 apartments are individually designed by the Swiss interior design bureau COCC, whose vision and values match perfectly with our project. Each unit comes fully equipped with an en suite bathroom, kitchenette, queen size beds, entertainment system and air conditioning. Wherever possible, we are using locally sourced and recycled materials, such as fabrics made by recycling pioneers Christian Fischbacher Co. AG of St. Gallen, who have been working with textiles made from PET bottles for over ten years, when today’s sustainability mindset was still in its early stages.
For our marketing strategy we once again went back to our initially researched consumer habits and preferences as well as defined an omnichannel approach for building brand awareness and lead generation. It contains traditional channels such as local news media, out-of-home presence and events for decision makers, journalists and the local population, but also digital activities, ranging from international search engine advertising, multi-step data-driven display- and video-ads along the purchase funnel and email marketing automation. A special focus is set on storytelling and influencer marketing within the expat community to convey our specifically tailored product and brand message in an authentic voice.
In a nutshell, Ariv offers attractive plug & play accommodation and social integration without access barriers such as long searches, waiting lists, notice periods or high initial costs. We think that moving to a new destination and adapting to it already bears a fair share of tasks and challenges, of which finding the best place to live is among the toughest choices.
Our goal is to help new arrivals effortlessly integrate into a new environment and find everything they need for a great experience; a thoughtfully designed apartment in a vibrant and safe neighbourhood, and an exciting and open-minded community.
Taking the famous saying “You never get a second chance for a first impression” seriously, we set our focus on the topic of ‘ARIVing’. This includes a thoughtfully engineered onboarding process and applied Swiss precision in our service design. We want to provide a starting point to immerse in local culture, the amenities to keep up with already established individual routines to maintain a sense of continuity and plenty of inspiration to expand one’s horizons.
We think it is not appealing to waste time and money to find out how daily life works – rather, have it all sorted and get to know the country, the people and local culture from day one. Hence our brand promise:
Ariv – Instantly at Home.
